Project management, especially in the area of corporate real estate project management, is traditionally a process which is driven by paper forms and documents. These paper documents include for example, purchase orders, work orders, contracts, Requests for Assistance (RFA), Requests for Proposals (RFPs), commitments, bids, invoices, messages (generic correspondence), meeting announcements and minutes, project close outs, complete punch lists, project evaluations, and departmental statistics.
The processing of all of these various documents is very labor intensive, error prone and subjects the proposed projects to needless delays. For example, if the manager in charge of approving commitments is on a business trip for two weeks, a commitment requiring his or her signature might be delayed for an additional six weeks, which in turn delays another vendor's initiation of work and so on.
Furthermore, an increase in the number of requests for new construction or engineering projects increases the volume of documents that are processed by the project administration group and the accounting operations group. This in turn requires an increase in processing capacity through an increase in staff levels or overtime. Conversely, a decrease in volume of requests lowers the productivity of the groups, as the staff levels are maintained to support the processing at the peak operations volume.